Browsing Posts published on May 6, 2014

Cats are picky eaters, correct? Some, at least in my experience, can be finicky, but that’s the privilege of the pampered.

House cat–AdstockRF

Put a cat outdoors in a wild setting, and the creature becomes a potentially lethal presence on the land—and, moreover, one that can make use of many kinds of food resources.

It was the catholicity of the cats that led to the survival of the mountain lion 12,000-odd years ago, a time of environmental stress and, not coincidentally, of the widespread arrival of humans in North America. Reporting their results in the scholarly journal Biology Letters, a team from the University of Wyoming and Vanderbilt University analyzed the dental remains of Pleistocene big cats taken from the famed La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and compared them with the teeth of contemporary cougars. Using a technique called dental microwear texture analysis, they discovered that the ancestral cougars did better than the other big cats of the day because they ate pretty much whatever they could, whereas their kin were more narrowly specialized. The general eaters lived to tell the tale: only the cougar and the jaguar remain of the six species of large cat that lived in North America during the last Ice Age.

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.